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Chrono Cross?

Final Fantasy X-2, Unlimited SAGA, The Bouncer, FInal Fantasy VII: Dirge of Cerberus. Just to name a few.

How does "intriguing but didn't live up to its predecessor" equate with "sucked"?

And Rachel, GTFO. No FFX-2 bashing on this website.

I think Unlimited SAGA may have been redeemed by the quality of its music alone. This is the power of Masashi Hamauzu.

Personally, FFXII left me with one of the worst feelings about a game in a long time. I was baffled that they managed to screw it up so badly (storywise -- gameplay wise was fine, but hey, what leaves an impression?). I just can't comprehend that there was a process of spending months with this finale and ending as "definitive" without someone saying "wait a minute, this sucks ass, we can come up with something better than this". I want to know what went wrong and who got punished, and how they're going to restore my faith in their ability to execute on major projects.

I think you're going to have to write that off as personal taste, Mahi-Rahi. The sheer majority of people I've encountered, including myself, have praised the storyline very highly.

Yeah the big problem with XII was the story. Minimum character chemistry/conflicts and the story tapered off to quickly without giving a sense of closure (I thought I was around the middle when I was beating the damn thing!) Since everything else was awesome and the world did feel very accomplished, id say it wasn't a disappointment.

X-2 story wise it was nothing special, but thats OK since it was supposed to be lighthearted and I can ignore all the horrible jokes, the fighting system was legit and amazing, easily my second favorite in a FF game after XII (with Chrono Trigger still having my favorite battle mechanic)

Chrono Cross is a huge bag of worms I dont want to open again. Its a playable game, but its incomplete and unrefined in every aspect with the exception of the art (albeit it was polished and colorful, I wasn't a big fan of the art direction), music and translation.

Other than that I tend to really enjoy most Squeenix stuff I buy, stuff like Unlimited Saga and the Bouncer I knew were gonna bomb so I didnt bother. FF IX had some charisma issues for me, but it was a fine game and with VIII I put well over 100 hours into it, so really any problems I had with it will sound hypocritical at this point.

Oh and I forgot Star Ocean Til the End of Time...they force you to play a side quest so long that you forget main plot by the time the story starts again and not to long after that you discover that the main plot of the game was pointless from the word go.

You can't praise the FFXII storyline, it was never finished! I will accept praise of the earlier plot developments, but anything after Ridorana no longer counts as anything worthwhile. He-Man Vayne does not, in my eyes or anyone else's with any kind of taste, equate with "good storytelling".

There are several elements to FFXII's storyline that I appreciate and think many people misunderstand, one of which being that the main characters "suffer" from underdevelopment, while it was quite plain to see that both Vaan and Penelo were merely present for the ride as observers and never meant to undergo the kind of relevance to the central arc as Ashe, Balthier, Basch etc. were. Nevertheless, the ending still features them centrally as representative of the events after the conclusion of the game. Which to me merely indicates that the team that took over from Matsuno halfway through development made changes and didn't understand where he was going with the plot. The sudden transgression from intelligent bad guy Vayne to mindless superpowered Seymour ripoff Vayne further illustrates this suspicion.

Xavi summarised it fairly well: the story ends in the middle of what Matsuno was trying to tell us. And for that complete project cock-up, Square Enix lost most of its respect points in my book.

I will comment on FFX-2: scenariowise very interesting, as it gave us a chance to look upon a world already "saved", but with the political struggle such a situation would lead to. Scriptwise: horrible, but then we're not expecting team Kitase to produce any good scripts in the first place; this isn't Bioshock. Antics-wise: both sarcastic and irrelevant, if you could comprehend the lesbian backrub scene, then I think you understood where FFX-2 was aiming and it wasn't necessarily only giving 14 year old boys a hard-on. And of course, it had the closest to Chrono Trigger ATB system we'll probably ever see.

Chrono Cross I think remains interesting for similar reasons to FFX-2 in that we were able to observe a world that got screwed up by being saved. It was ballsy to kill off all the characters from CT and that gets my respect; further, there were several good ideas in the storyline, even if their explanation wasn't executed as well as, say, FFVII.

I think the only Square-Soft game I didn't enjoy (that I have played) was the Bouncer. I was hoping it would remind me of old games like Final Fight and Streets of Rage, but it did not come close.

Games I enjoyed well enough (again, that I played) but had issue with were Chrono Cross, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, FFX-2. I agree killing off the CT characters was a gutsy move, but I think it was done in poor taste and ultimately left me very disappointed knowing all the characters in that game, that I grew to love, met an ill fate. FFTA was just mediocre and I didn't like how kiddy the game felt compared to its predecessor. And as much as I like many Japanese products (video games, anime, comic books, etc.) I really dislike it when their products are so overtly influenced by Japanese pop culture. It just feels weird to me. Thus, FFX-2 was not a game I was a big fan of.

I never really payed attention to FFXII's storyline, like, at all... I was a bit sidetracked by the awesome gameplay. I don't even know what the fuck is going on here, I'm on my way to a thing underground or something? Like, an old thing? It's like a city? Who am I fighting? I don't know. Anyway, I'm really enjoying myself.

FFXII had a storyline? I thought it was just a collection of randomly awesome events.

EVERY, I REPEAT, EVERY Mana game since Seiken Densetsu 3.
Final Fantasy Tactics Advance

hmm...out of the games i've played, I think thats about it.